Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina

They finished another swath and another. They went through long swaths, short swaths, with bad grass, with good grass. Levin lost all awareness of time and had no idea whether it was late or early. A change now began to take place in his work which gave him enormous pleasure. In the midst of his work moments came to him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and in those moments his swath came out as even and good as Titus's. But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and started trying to do better, he at once felt how hard the work was and the swath came out badly (p. 251).

Indeed, what was there for him [Levin] to do [in the city]? He did not like to play cards. He did not go to the club. To keep company with merry men like Oblonsky -- she [Kitty] now knew what that meant . . . it meant drinking and going somewhere afterward. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. To go out in society? But for that she knew that one had to take pleasure in meeting young women, and she could not wish for that. To sit at home with her and her mother and sister? . . . What was left for him to do? To go on writing his book? He did try to do that, and in the beginning went to the library to take notes and references; but, as he told her, the longer he did nothing, the less time he had left (p. 672).

Understanding clearly then for the first time that for every man and for himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he [Levin] decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he had either to explain his life so that it did not look like the wicked mockery of some devil, or shoot himself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, and had gone on living, thinking and feeling, and had even married at that same time and experienced much joy, and was happy whenever he did not think about the meaning of his life.

What did it mean? It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.

He lived (without being aware of it) by those spiritual truths that he had drunk in with his mother's milk, yet he thought not only without admitting those truths but carefully avoiding them.

Now it was clear to him that he was able to live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

'What would I be and how would I life my life, if I did not have those beliefs, did not know that one should live for God and not for one's needs? I would rob, lie, kill. Nothing of what constitutes the main joys of my life would exist for me.' And, making the greatest efforts of imagination, he was still unable to imagine the beastly being that he himself would be if he did not know what he lived for.

'I sought an answer to my question. But the answer to my question could not come from thought, which is incommensurable with the question. The answer was given by life itself, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And I did not acquire that knowledge through anything, it was given to me as it is to everyone, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

'Where did I take it from? Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbour and not throttling him? I was told it was a child, and I joyfully believed it, because they told me what was in my soul. And who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. that is the conclusion of Reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it's unreasonable.

'Yes, pride,' he said to himself, rolling over on his stomach and beginning to tie stalks of grass into a knot, trying not to break them.

'And not only the pride of reason, but the stupidity of reason. And, above all -- the slyness, precisely the slyness, of reason. Precisely the swindling of reason,' he repeated. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 796-97).

(Pevear and Volokhonsky's recent translation of Anna Karenina has restored life to a vital, compassionate novel about suffering and loss, birth and redemption. It's all here -- birth, death, marriage, adultery, suicide, and rebirth. Even Levin's dog Laska gets a word in edgewise.)

Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain

I walk down the slope, following the sound of the drums. A peasant goes by along the embankment with his trouser legs rolled up, his calves covered in mud. A little further on a child is leading a water buffalo on a rope towards a pond near the village. I look at the smoke rising from the chimneys over the rooftops below and a peacefulness rises in my heart (p. 160).

These shoes which I bought for this long trip have been in rain and mud and fully immersed in rivers. They are out of shape, black and dirty, and no-one could imagine that once they had been offered at a high price as fashionable travel shoes (p. 254).

People, in the final analysis, aren't wolves but more like feral dogs (p. 254).

"The true traveller is without goal, it is the absence of goals which creates the ultimate traveller" (p. 277).

You are always searching for your childhood and it's becoming an obsession. Y0u want to visit each of the places you stayed during your childhood, the houses, courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory.

Your home was once upstairs in a small solitary building on a vacant lot with a big pile of rubble at the front: the building that once stood there had been destroyed by a bomb or a fire and had never been rebuilt. Green bristlegrass grew in the rubble and broken walls, and crickets could often be found when the broken tiles and bricks were turned over. There was a very clever type of cricket called Black Satin Cream and when their shiny ink-black wings vibrated they made a clear, resonating sound. There was also another kind called Locust which had a big body and a big mouth and was good at fighting. As a child you had a wonderful time on that rubble heap (p. 325).

"This isn't a novel!"

"Then what is it?" he asks.

"A novel must have a complete story."

He says he has told many stories, some with endings and others without.

"They're all fragments without any sequence, the author doesn't know how to organize connected episodes."

"Then may I ask how a novel is supposed to be organized?"

"You must first foreshadow, build to a climax, then have a conclusion. That's basic common knowledge for writing fiction."

He asks if fiction can be written without conforming to the method which is common knowledge. It would just be like a story, with parts told from beginning to end and parts from end to beginning, parts with a beginning and no ending and others which are only conclusions or fragments which aren't followed up, parts which are developed but aren't completed or which can't be completed or which can be left out or which don't need to be told any further or about which there's nothing more to say. And all of these would be considered stories. (Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain. Transl. Mabel Lee. Harper Perennial, 2001, p. 452. [First published as Lingshan in Twaiwan in 1990 by Lianjing Chuanshe; first US edn. HarperCollins, 2000.])